Patrick White

Yes, There Are Pale Gardens - Poem by Patrick White

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Yes, there are pale gardens, wings ribbed like the eyelashes of butterflies, and roses of flaking blood rooted like something that was said between the lines of lovers in a book of fossils in the Burgess Shale.

Even the silence that binds the sacred to the mundane when the margins of beauty are feathered by the eyes of peacocksin the apple green dusk bleeding into mystic blue,

as if one weren’t enough to anticipatethe stars emerging like a gentle rain, the breath of your lover on the hairs of your arm, as if the dark were crying through tears of lightfrom the clouds of unknowing, from the fathomless watersheds of life and death,

even these tender precipitates of the light that come on like porches and fireflies and lamp-posts in this breathless interim where we neither let things go nor take them in, nothing born yet of its native watersand no corpse to wash for burial, neither prelude to the night, nor epilogue of the day,

even the silence, unliving, undead, unborn, unperishing, can sometimes seem as dessicated and stale as the bread and the salt we laid out on the kitchen table as a feastto welcome our ghosts back as if they were the guests for a change, and wetheir absent hosts only a threshold away from revealing the mirage of our own originsto those who have dismissed us like the wisdom of old wives’ tales vaguely remembering the distant legends of our own mythic past that animated us once like dragons in the dawn that vowed never to be false to its own beginnings.

So I have not forgotten you like the tattoo of a starmap inked indelibly on this paper-thin skin of water like a gravemarker of the oceans of the moon that have dried up since the heart has stopped flowing into themlike a waterclock of shadows trying to top off the overturned hourglasses of better times.

No other place the past has ever lived but in the specious present, in the same house of life it was born into and you have gone on morphing where sacred rivers join at the meeting place of tribal fires that have grown brighter over the lightyears than ghost dancers inspired by the shadows of things to come out of these penumbral sketches

as I have always done and do like quick studies of your face since I met you like someoneI would keep on encountering for the rest of my lifein the charcoal and ashes of first magnitude dragons that still burn like candles beside the beds we lay down in where we couldn’t tell if we drowned in the oceans of the rose like the waves of the vast night seathat overwhelmed the bodies of our lifeboats in rogue sunamis, or the flames of desire we were cremated in prophetically like butterflies that burned like furnaces in the infernoes of our mouths as we drifted off like satisfied fire hydrants into the mindstreams that flowed like rose petals strewn in the happy gutters of dreams that didn’t long for anything more than what our arms could holdof blood and hair and eyelids, lips and breasts, and the mystic defaults we fell back upon like the feather pillows of our dishevelled humanity.

No urns, but the kilns have remained hotas the Pleiades, and the vases we turned like our bodies back then are still arranging the constellations like wildflowers that haven’t shape-shifted into kitchen pots and garden plotswhere lovers scatter their ashes on the roots of rosesmummified in bark and burlap, hoping they’ll make it through another long winterthat drags on like the extinction of spring in a homely afterlife awaiting the return of everything.